Media: in Austria heating bills will increase by an average of 50 percent

VIENNA, 23 Sep – PRIME. Central heating bills will rise by an average of 50% this year in Austria, reports the Kleine Zeitung newspaper.

According to the publication, in Vienna the cost of central heating “will double in price since autumn.” Also this year, the price for this service for about 100 thousand households in the federal state of Styria will increase by 65 percent, the newspaper writes.

Kelag Energie & Wärme, the main energy supplier in the federal state of Carinthia, told Kleine Zeitung that “customers will see a price in the 2022 bill 20 to 40 percent higher than in 2021.”

Austria will “survive the winter” amid the EU’s energy crisis, but “there may be less heating,” President Alexander van der Bellen said earlier in an interview with the Kronen Zeitung newspaper. The head of state added that he assesses the prospects for the country’s economy to cope with the energy crisis “with cautious optimism.”

Earlier, the leader of the opposition right-wing nationalist party FPÖ, Herbert Kickl, accused the Austrian government of hiding the truth from the population – the republic will not be able to abandon Russian oil and Russian gas for a long time, short-term plans to change supplies and the structure of the energy market are “wishes, it’s all built on sand,” the politician said. He added that Europe, against the background of the rejection of Russian energy carriers, is facing “the biggest economic disaster since the Second World War.”

In mid-September, mass protests organized by trade unions took place in Vienna and other regions of Austria. Their participants demanded decisive steps from the authorities in the fight against inflation and rising energy prices.